| This dissertation aims at synchronic description of the Dagur verb on the basis of the author's own speech that belongs to the Qiqihar dialect. It is organized into six chapters: Introduction, Literature Review, Verb Formation, Inflection, Morphophonemics, and Conclusion.; Chapter 1 deals with the goal, linguistic and ethnic background of Dagur, theoretical approach to the Dagur verb, and other related issues. Chapter 2 reviews the descriptions made by previous researchers. Chapter 3 divides verb formation into four parts according to the morphological processes involved: suffixation, conversion, consonant modification, and compounding. Suffixes are added to nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs to create verbs. Compound verbs are composed of an existing verb plus the verbs meaning 'to go' and 'to come.' Conversion and consonant modification take place in a considerable number of verb formations. This chapter also explores how Chinese loan verbs are adjusted to the Dagur morphological process. Chapter 4 focuses on verbal inflection and discusses the citation form, the distinction between inflection and word formation, the grammatical categories of tense, person, voice, mood, converb, and gerund. The inflections for tense and person are divided into the positive paradigm, the negative paradigm, and the embedded phrase paradigm. The inflections are also affected by a harsh manner of speaking, which is simply an idiosyncratic and language-specific property of Dagur at this stage of its development. The voices are four: active, passive, reciprocal, and causative. The suffixes for voice are analyzed as inflectional. The moods are four: indicative, imperative, affirmative, and exclamatory. Chapter 5 discusses the four morphophonemic phenomena: gemination, vowel harmony, rhotacism occurring in the Venspace C environment, and umlaut. Geminate consonant result from the assimilation of the initial consonants of suffixes to the final consonants of bases. The rule of vowel harmony is that the vowels of the non-initial syllables depend on the vowel of the initial syllable on the principle of phonetic features such as back, from, high, and round. Vowel harmony affects both the stem vowels and the suffix vowels in concentration. Chapter 6 is a brief summary of characteristic features of Dagur verb morphology. |
